Tag Archives: New Media Consortium

Once again I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to participate in the NMC Horizon Report K-12 as a member of the international Advisory Board. I was joined by fellow Australians Tony Brandenburg (Education Services Australia), Daniel Ingvarson (National Schools Interoperability Program), Julie Lindsay (Flat Classroom Project), and Kathryn Moyle (Centre for School Leadership, Learning and Development).

The New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), with the support of HP, produced the NMC Horizon Report > 2013 K-12 Edition, which was released in a special session at the NMC Summer Conference. This fifth edition in the annual K-12 series of the NMC Horizon Project examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry within the environment of pre-college education.

Six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, as well as key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, giving educators, school administrators, and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning:

Cloud computing

Mobile Learning

Learning Analytics

Open Content

3D Printing

Virtual and Remote Laboratories

The NMC Horizon Report > 2013 K-12 Edition is available online, free of charge, and published under a Creative Commons license to facilitate its widespread use, easy duplication, and broad distribution. Do make sure that you grab a copy and share it with your staff!

In a world where libraries are completely reinventing themselves, where
universities and schools are moving away from labs to BYOD, and where the focus of everything seems to be on mobiles —what will be the role of technology in the next decade? What do leading institutions need to be doing now to prepare? What are the strategies that will provide them the most flexibility? The greatest competitive advantage?

These are the overarching questions that recently drove the discussions at 10th anniversary New Media Consortium Horizon Project special convocation and retreat. Over its decade of work, the Horizon Project has grown to the point that it may very well be producing the single most important body of research into emerging technology within the world of education. With more than one million downloads and 27 translations in the past ten years, the NMC Horizon Report series provides the higher education, K-12, and museum communities across the globe a key strategic technology planning tool that is continuously refreshed and updated.

The NMC and the Horizon Project are best known for its flagship Horizon Reports that focus on higher education and K-12 globally. Now, with 10 years of research that has helped us understand the nature and range of impact of emerging technolgies, the 100 thoughtleaders involved in the retreat have moved from reflections and metalearnings from the last decade, to notions of renewal and transformation, to ultimately metatrends and action.

Out of the discussion, 28 metatrends were identified. Of these, the ten most significant are
listed here and will be the focus of the upcoming NMC Horizon Project 10th Anniversary Report:

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and time zones. Not only are teams geographically diverse, they are also culturally diverse.2.People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone, tablet, and ereader. People now expect a seamless experience across all their devices.3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network — and already is at its edges.
Mobithinking reports there are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts. 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well, and 85% of new devices can access the mobile web.4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. Our current expectation is that the network has almost infinite capacity and is nearly free of cost. One hour of video footage is uploaded every second to YouTube; over 250 million photos are sent to Facebook every day.5. Openness — concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information — is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media.6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. In an age where so much of our information, records, and digital content are in the cloud, and often clouds in other legal jurisdictions, the very concept of ownership is blurry.7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. Access to learning in any form is a challenge in too many parts of the world, and efficiency in learning systems and institutions is increasingly an expectation of governments — but the need for solutions that scale often trumps them both. Innovations in these areas are increasingly coming from unexpected parts of the world, including India, China, and central Africa.8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information and media are paramount.9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia — and worldwide. As a result, credibility, validity, and control are all notions that are no longer givens when so much learning takes place outside school systems.10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Libraries are deeply reimagining their missions; colleges and universities are struggling to reduce costs across the board. The educational ecosystem is shifting, and nowhere more so than in the world of publishing, where efforts to reimagine the book are having profound success, with implications that will touch every aspect of the learning enterprise.

These metatrends are the first of much yet to come in the next year. Watch NMC.org for news and more throughout the Horizon Project’s 10th Anniversary. To be part of the discussions, follow #NMChz!

The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment. To create the report, the Horizon Project’s Advisory Board, an international body of experts in education, technology, business, and other fields, engaged in a discussion based on a set of research questions intended to surface significant trends and challenges and to identify a broad array of potential technologies for the report.

Over the course of just a few weeks, the Advisory Board came to a consensus about the six topics that appear here in the 2011 Horizon Report. On the near-term horizon — that is, within the next 12 months — are mobile computing and open content. The second adoption horizon is set two to three years out, where we will begin to see widespread adoptions of two well-established technologies that have taken off by making use of the global cellular networks — electronic books and simple augmented reality.On the far-term horizon, set at four to five years away for widespread adoption, but clearly already in use in some quarters, are gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

The Horizon Report K-12 Edition

If you work in K-12 education, read this report. However, the The Horizon Report K-12 Edition will be available in May, which should be in time for you to write your visionary plans and budget proposals ready for 2012.

Once again I’m excited to have been invited to join the Advisory Board for 2011. The Advisory Board uses their expertise to place the technologies we consider for the report on adoption timelines, and to rank their potential impacts on education. As a member of the Advisory Board, I’m included as part of an extraordinary group of multi-disciplinary thinkers from both within and outside education. Participation on the Horizon.K12 Advisory Board is by invitation only, and completely voluntary. Leslie Conery (ISTE), Keith Krueger (CoSN), and Larry Johnson (NMC) will serve as the co-principal investigators for the work this year.

For many campuses [and schools], the question is which learning technologies to support locally to support deeper student engagement with learning.

The information in the Horizon Report, published annually by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC), can help.2 The report identifies and describes the key trends and critical challenges associated with those emerging technologies that are likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, creative inquiry, and student engagement in higher education over the next five years. It categorizes six areas of emerging technologies within three adoption horizons: a year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. A quick review of the report and its vast collection of examples and practices can serve as the preliminary research needed for an institution to proceed tactically.

This article from Educause Review addresses three technologies from the 2010 Horizon Report: electronic books, mobile computing, and open content. Both mobile computing and open content are within the one-year-or-less time-to-adoption; electronic books are in the two-to-three-years adoption horizon.

If we want to discover how we can engage students as well as ourselves in the 21st century, we must move beyond skills and technologies. We must explore also the interconnected social media literacies of attention, participation, cooperation, network awareness, and critical consumption.

Although I consider attention to be fundamental to all the other literacies, the one that links together all the others, and although it is the one I will spend the most time discussing in this article, none of these literacies live in isolation.1 They are interconnected. You need to learn how to exercise mindful deployment of your attention online if you are going to become a critical consumer of digital media; productive use of Twitter or YouTube requires knowledge of who your public is, how your participation meets their needs (and what you get in return), and how memes flow through networked publics. Ultimately, the most important fluency is not in mastering a particular literacy but in being able to put all five of these literacies together into a way of being in digital culture.

The Horizon Report 2009 K-12 is here! Naturally I’m thrilled to bits, for professional and personal reasons.

Firstly, because the Horizon reports, that have been released since 2004 and which have provided critical information for educators about emerging technologies and their impact on society and education – has now released its first report for K-12. Horizon.K12 focuses on emerging technologies for elementary and secondary learning institutions.

Secondly, I was so lucky to be included on the Advisory Panel of the K-12 Report. Just being part of the process was amazing – but seeing such a breadth of information, and engaging in the process of filtering was an education in itself. Much material was covered, as we read, filtered and sifted priorities – we’ve seen what didn’t make it into the report – so maybe we got to know what might come next :-)

While there are many local factors affecting the practice of education, there are also issues that transcend regional boundaries, questions we all face in K-12 education, and it was with these in mind that this K12 report was created. The hope is that the report is useful to educators worldwide, and the international composition of the Advisory Board reflects the care with which a global perspective was assembled.

Saturday has an exciting edge to it for me. Alan Levine has finally made it back to Sydney on his travelling tour Australia, which he has been documenting in his flipped version of his blog at CogDogRoo!

Alan is an inspiration to many of us, so if you haven’t added his blog to your RSS feeds, then you’d better catch up now! CogDogBlog is Alan’s place to bark about cool technology, web X.0 hype, weird web sites, photography, and other targets big and small.

This is my chance to say thanks Alan! Thanks mate!

Alan is a pretty important guy really :-) as Director, Technology Resources and Member Services of the New Media Consortium (NMC) as well as the Vice President Community and CTO with an international group of colleagues. In Second Life everyone knows he’s a dog (CDB Barkley)!

I met Alan recently ‘in world’ during a NSW Learnscope seminar being hosted on Jokaydia Island (where I have the good fortune to regularly meet educators from Australia to talk the good talk). In fact we had a good gathering at HeyJude Hall last night (that’s my place in Jokaydia and I’m Heyjude Jenns ‘in world’). Thanks to Sue Waters (Ruby Imako) for managing all the introductions! Phew!).

I was so excited by the whole ‘in world’ seminar that I didn’t stop to talk or ask questions. Today its different. A bunch of us are meeting up with Alan for shopping, movie and dinner – somehow I think we’ll all be barking furiously for a piece of the action.